Henry Stephens Salt

Vegetarianism

Salt's vegetarianism developed alongside his social, political, and religious views. He was influenced by Shelley, whom he regarded as a mentor, and by Howard Williams's The Ethics of Diet, which he praised for its treatment of humane diet. Salt argued that meat, commonly treated as food, was the flesh of animals slaughtered in harsh conditions. Sky Duthie writes that Salt connected the treatment of animals with other forms of violence and injustice, including war, imperialism, and the effects of competitive capitalism.^[9]

In 1885, Salt became a vice-president of the Vegetarian Society. The following year, he published A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays, a collection that set out his rational approach to vegetarian advocacy. Salt treated vegetarianism as part of a wider reform movement that he called "humanitarianism".^[10]

Salt's writings influenced Gandhi's move from religiously based vegetarianism to ethical vegetarianism. Gandhi encountered Salt's Plea for Vegetarianism in a London vegetarian restaurant, read it, and later wrote that the book strengthened his commitment to the diet. Gandhi supported the British vegetarian movement and shared a platform with Salt at a 1931 London Vegetarian Society meeting, where he gave the speech "The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism".^[9]

Humanitarian League

In 1891, Salt co-founded the Humanitarian League, which campaigned for social and legal reforms based on the principle of humaneness. Its outlook drew on the view that scientific advances and evolutionary biology had weakened established distinctions between races, classes, and species. The League was associated with early organised humanism and included members such as Howard Williams, Alice Drakoules, Edward Maitland, and Kenneth Romanes. It opened a London office in 1895, launched the journal Humanity, and held the first National Humanitarian Conference. From 1897 to 1919, it was based at Chancery Lane and campaigned against corporal punishment, blood sports, and other practices it regarded as cruel. After Salt stepped down in 1919, the League dissolved. In 1924, former members founded the League Against Cruel Sports.^[11]

Animal rights

In Salt's essay "A Good Taste in Diet", published in A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays (1886), he wrote:^[12]

Can any thoughtful man, in the face of such horrors, deliberately choose to be a flesh-eater? Must he not rather turn with relief to a vegetarian diet, with which alone can exist that widely sympathetic intellectual gentleness which recognises the rights, not of man only, but of all the animal creation.

Keith Tester writes that, in 1892, Salt created an "epistemological break" by being the first writer to discuss animal rights explicitly, rather than only better animal welfare.^[13] In Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, Salt wrote that he wanted to "set the principle of animals' rights on a consistent and intelligible footing, [and] to show that this principle underlies the various efforts of humanitarian reformers ...":^[14]

Even the leading advocates of animal rights seem to have shrunk from basing their claim on the only argument which can ultimately be held to be a really sufficient one--the assertion that animals, as well as men, though, of course, to a far less extent than men, are possessed of a distinctive individuality, and, therefore, are in justice entitled to live their lives with a due measure of that 'restricted freedom' to which Herbert Spencer alludes.

Salt argued that rights should not be claimed for animals while being subordinated to human interests. He rejected the assumption that a human life necessarily has more value than a non-human life:^[14]

[The] notion of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day--it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a 'great gulf' fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood.